Among Christians, the word heresy must be used with care and precision. Not every doctrinal error is a heresy, though all doctrinal error is to be avoided. A heresy is the denial or corruption of a Christian doctrine that is central to the faith and essential to the gospel. The late theologian Harold O. J. Brown defined heresy as a doctrinal error “so important that those who believe it, who the church calls heretics, must be considered to have abandoned the faith.”

Premillennialists consider postmillennialists to be in error, but they do not consider postmillennialists to be heretics. Those who deny the Trinity, on the other hand, are heretics, and the believing church must consider non-trinitarians to have departed the faith. The same must be said of those who deny the full deity and humanity of Jesus Christ.

Today, we must recognize and condemn another heresy that has reared its ugly head. The killing of nine worshippers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., is a hideous demonstration of this heresy’s deadly power. The young white man charged with the killings has not, as yet, claimed a theological rationale for his acts. Nevertheless, he has been exposed as someone whose worldview was savagely warped by the ideology of racial superiority – white superiority.

If the reach of that ideology could be limited to a few fringe figures, we could allow ourselves to be less concerned. But the ideology that was represented in Dylann Roof’s reported words as he killed and in the photographs and evidence found on his Internet postings is not limited to a small fringe.

The ideology of racial superiority is one of the saddest and most sordid evidences of the Fall and its horrifying effects. Throughout history, racial ideologies have been driving forces of war, of demagoguery and of dictatorships.

At the same time, many white Americans claimed and assumed the superiority of caucasian skin to black and brown skin – or any other color of skin. The main “color line,” as Frederick Douglass called it in 1881, has always been black and white in America. While theories of racial superiority have been popular in both the North and the South, it was the states of the old Confederacy that gave those ideologies their most fertile soil. White superiority was claimed as a belief by both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, but it was the Confederacy that made racial superiority a central purpose.

More humbling still is the fact that many churches, churchmen and theologians gave sanction to that ideology. While this was true throughout the southern churches, Southern Baptists bear a particular responsibility and burden of history. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) was not only founded by slaveholders; it was founded by men who held to an ideology of racial superiority and who bathed that ideology in scandalous theological argument. At times, white superiority was defended by a putrid exegesis of the Bible that claimed a “curse of Ham” as the explanation of dark skin – an argument that reflects such ignorance of scripture that it could only be believed by those who were looking for an argument to satisfy their prejudices.

I gladly stand with the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in their courageous affirmation of biblical orthodoxy, Baptist beliefs and missionary zeal. There would be no Southern Baptist Convention and no Southern Seminary without them. James P. Boyce, Basil Manly Jr. and John A. Broadus were titans of the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

But there is more to the story. The founders of the SBC and of Southern Seminary were defenders of slavery. Boyce and Broadus were chaplains in the Confederate army. Just a few months ago I was reading a history of Greenville, S.C., where Southern Seminary was founded, when I came across a racist statement made by Boyce, my ultimate predecessor as president of the seminary. It was so striking that I had to find a chair. This, too, is our story.

By every reckoning, Boyce and Broadus were consummate Christian gentlemen, given the culture of their day. They would have been horrified, I am certain, by any act of violence against any person. But any strain of racial superiority, and especially any strain bathed in the language of Christian theology, is deadly dangerous all the same.

In 1995, on the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Southern Baptist Convention, the denomination publicly repented of its roots in the defense of slavery. In 2015, far more is required of us. It is not enough to repent of slavery. We must seek to confront and remove every strain of racial superiority that remains and seek with all our strength to be the kind of churches of which Jesus would be proud – churches that will look like the marriage supper of the Lamb.

I do not know all that this will require of us. I intend to keep those names on our buildings and to stand without apology with the founders and their affirmation of Baptist orthodoxy. But those names on our buildings and college and professorial chairs and endowed scholarships do not represent unmixed pride. While we the living cannot repent on behalf of those who are dead, we can repent for the legacy that we would otherwise perpetuate and extend by silence.

I bear the burden of acknowledging the totality of the legacy and the responsibility to set things right as far as I have the opportunity to set them right. I am so thankful that the racist ideologies of the past would rightly horrify the faculty and students of the present. And yet, are we horrified enough?

While I could never fly the flag that represented their cause in battle, perhaps most of today’s defenders of that flag do not intend to send a racial message nor to defy civil rights. But some do, and there is no way to escape the symbolism that so wounds our neighbors and our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. Today, most who defend that flag do so to claim a patrimony and to express love for a region. But that is not the whole story, and we know it.

And now the hardest part. Were the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary heretics?

They defended all the doctrines they believed were central and essential to the Christian faith as revealed in the Bible and as affirmed throughout the history of the church. They sought to defend Baptist orthodoxy in an age already tiring of orthodoxy. They would never have imagined themselves as heretics, and in one sense they certainly were not. Nor, we should add, was Martin Luther a heretic, even as he expressed a horrifying antisemitism.

But I would argue the separation of human beings into ranks of superiority and inferiority differentiated by skin color is a direct assault upon the doctrine of Creation and an insult to the image of God in which every human being is made. It is also directly subversive of the gospel of Christ, reducing the power of His substitutionary atonement and undermining the faithful preaching of the gospel to all persons and to all nations.

So far as I can tell, no one ever confronted the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention and Southern Seminary with the brutal reality of what they were doing, believing and teaching in this regard. The same seems to be true in the case of Martin Luther and his antisemitism. For that matter, how recently were these sins recognized as sins and repented of?

We cannot change the past, but we must learn from it. There is no way to confront the dead with their heresies, but there is no way to avoid the reckoning that we must make, and the repentance that must be our own.

By God’s grace, this is the best I know to say. By God’s grace, may I not die with heresies unknown to me, but all too known to my children and to my children’s children.

(EDITOR’S NOTE – Adapted from an article that first appeared at Southern Seminary’s AlbertMohler.com website. R. Albert Mohler Jr. is president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.)

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Since 1833 the Biblical Recorder has served North Carolina Baptists as the Baptist State Convention's official news journal - with the emphasis on news. The paper was founded by Thomas Meredith, an early pastor, writer and denominational statesman in North Carolina.